FL-T Series Fuel Tanks Revamp

[Moss]

Are the 1.25m parts going to get a model / texture update like the Rockomax ones did?

[Snark]

35 minutes ago, Moss said:

Are the 1.25m parts going to get a model / texture update like the Rockomax ones did?

I don't believe Squad has said anything about such plans, so the answer is "nobody knows, but there's been no indication of it happening."  I wouldn't hold your breath.

That said, a while back @Porkjet produced a revamped set of engine and tank models, shortly before he left Squad.  I gather that they were originally intended to go into the game, but something fell through and it never happened-- but they released his work-to-date as a downloadable package with a fairly permissive license, which means that they're out there.

They're not really "game-ready" in the released state-- they need some stitching together and config work.  Fortunately, there are folks out there willing to do such stiching ... so if you want them, you can have them.  Here's a mod with the revamped tanks in it:

 

It provides reskinned models/textures for all the 1.25m tanks, and also offers them in two variants (black/white and gray/orange, like the Missing History tanks).

Note that this mod does other stuff, too, such as redoing the models for several stock engines, adding a bunch of 1.875m parts, etc.  But if you don't want those and only want the re-done fuel tanks, you can just install the mod and then delete everything except the tanks.

I expect there are other mods out there too which may provide reskinned 1.25m tanks (including with this particular set of models)-- I merely mention this one because it's recent and being actively maintained.  Plus I'm, ah, fairly familiar with it. 

[klgraham1013]

Yeah.  Porkjet already did it.  I still wonder why the didn't add them in for 1.4.  Any answer is under NDA.  So, we'll never know.

[Moss]

Thanks @Snark for your reply and fantastic mod. Making History was released on March 13th and as far as I can tell you put your mod together a day later. I find it bizarre that Squad couldn't put in the same effort. It makes me suspect that they don't possess the IP for Porkjet's work and they'd need to negotiate with him some kind of arrangement, since they'd be adding it to their game which they charge money for. 

Edited July 6, 2018 by Moss
Trying to figure out how to tag someone with the @ symbol

[MR L A]

This is one thing that really annoys me about KSP.

I'm not somebody that things the game is missing a particular feature set like life-support or should have mods x,y and z as stock (Chatterer, ScanSat and KER if anyone asks me), but I do wish we had better game artwork. The MH parts were nicely done, but the white textures aren't even the same shade of white as other parts in the game . Things just don't match, and the worst part is, they're only out by a shade or two so they just look odd together more than anything else.

 

Porkjet's parts were beautiful and I honestly think it is a sin that they weren't released as part of the game rather than an optional download. I used to use the mod, but honestly I don't really like playing with part mods, especially mods of essential components.

[Snark]

3 hours ago, Moss said:

I find it bizarre that Squad couldn't put in the same effort.

2 hours ago, MR L A said:

Porkjet's parts were beautiful and I honestly think it is a sin that they weren't released as part of the game rather than an optional download.

Everyone can draw their own conclusions, of course, but speaking as a professional software developer with a quarter-century experience in the industry, I'm not inclined to point fingers, myself.

Lengthy rant (TL;DR:  "I don't think they necessarily Got It Wrong™ here") in spoiler section, since we're getting kinda off-topic from the original poster's question.

Spoiler

Just to be clear, as a preamble to the following:  I don't work for Squad, and am not any more privy to their internal business decisions and release processes than you are.  So I'm not speaking from any special, private knowledge, here.  I'm just speaking as someone who knows the industry reasonably well, who sees an event like this, and who sees nothing particularly amiss.

The thing to remember is that releasing commercial software is a big, fat, complicated, hairy deal.  It's not just a few nerds sitting down at some keyboards, banging out some code, and tossing it out the window to the teeming masses.  There's a lot of complicated machinery that goes on.  It involves artwork and engineering, yes... but there's also the complex math of business decisions, and the (sometimes byzantine) maze of contractual obligations and legal requirements, and conflicting market requirements, and sudden unexpected changes due to market conditions and competitors' products, and compromises worked out between different people with divergent opinions of What Should Be Done, and lots more.

As a customer, your interface to this vast, complicated machine is an extremely simple one.  To borrow a metaphor from Roald Dahl:  You walk into the candy store, fork over some cash, and they hand you a Wonka-Bar.  It seems simple to you, because the vast machinery of the chocolate factory that produced that candy bar is entirely absent from the transaction and not in your field of view.  You simply bite into it and decide whether you like the taste.  Simple, right?

But you don't get a tour of the chocolate factory, and you don't get to meet the Oompa-Loompas.

I do.  It's been my job for a pretty long time.  Of course, I don't work in Squad's chocolate factory, so I don't get to meet these particular Oompa-Loompas.  Which means I don't have any more information about the specific details than you do.  But I can say that there are, broadly speaking, certain things that are common to all such enterprises, and that is:  Everything happens for a reason.

The reasons won't be evident to you or me, because we're not inside and therefore can't see them.  But they're there-- and don't make the mistake of assuming that a thing that looks simple or obvious to you is actually simple or obvious.  It generally isn't.  And also remember that people who produce software for a living are generally not idiots.

So, suppose you find yourself in a situation where there are a bunch of people, working in an industry where folks tend to be pretty smart, who have years of experience doing this for a living, and who (unlike you or me) have full information about the situation.  And they've made some decisions that presumably make perfect sense to them, but which don't make any sense to you.  Which is the more likely conclusion?

• They know what they're doing, and if it doesn't make sense to you, it's because you don't have any actual information about the situation.  Or,
• Gosh, they must be idiots.

In my experience, the former is much more likely. 

Doesn't mean they're necessarily geniuses, or that they don't make mistakes-- everyone does that, even experts working in their own fields.  But whatever mistakes they've made probably weren't obvious ones at the time.  Hindsight is wonderful.

Leaving all this abstract hand-waving and getting back to the immediate particulars of this situation, I gather that the concern here is something along the lines of:  "Here are these great parts, and we'd love for them to be in the stock game, and they're not, and that seems wrong, and why didn't they do that?"

That's a perfectly reasonable question, and yes, I agree that from the perspective of outsiders like you and me, it seems pretty obvious that it's Wrong™.  However, putting on my software-engineer hat, and following the maxim that There Must Be A Reason™, I can indulge in the following completely speculative and unfounded wild-ass guesswork:

It seems clear to me that they wanted to put these parts in the stock game.  They presumably paid Porkjet to produce them, after all, and you don't spend money on a thing unless you plan to get good use out of it.  So the fact that they didn't do so likely means that something, somewhere, went off the rails.

There's no way for us to know exactly what, of course.  I note that this happened around the time that Porkjet left Squad.  We have no idea about his reasons for doing so, of course, nor of what sort of contractual stipulations may have been around his work up to that point-- but it's safe to say that there was some reason, and there was some contract (because nobody does anything without a reason, and nothing ever happens in business without a contract).

The simplest explanation for "why didn't they put it in the stock game", to me, is that they legally couldn't, for some reason that would be pointless to guess at.  My guess would be that they couldn't actually include it in the game, but they did have the latitude to be able to release it as a separate download, and to put a fairly permissive license on it.  So here they have these nifty parts, which the players would likely love to have, but they can't actually complete the work and/or include it in the game, for some reason, possibly contractual.  So, if we put ourselves in their shoes in such a situation, what could they do?

My guess-- in this admittedly wholly hypothetical situation that I've woven out of thin air, here-- is that someone with the best interest of players (and, therefore, the business) at heart decided to do the best they could.  They couldn't finish the parts or include them in the game, so they made the parts as accessible to players as they were able, given the constraints, by putting them up for public download.

^ There.  That makes sense to me.  As I keep emphasizing, I have no idea if it's actually true, or even vaguely in the same ballpark, since I'm not privy to such information any more than you are.  But it's a hypothesis that has the merits of being, 1. reasonably simple, and 2. consistent with observed facts, and 3. plausible to me based on my experience in the software biz.

And, incidentally, it's a hypothesis in which the folks at Squad are neither idiots nor villains and did what they did for reasons that even a customer would consider to be good ones.

Doesn't mean I've guessed right, of course.    I expect one could also construct alternative hypothetical scenarios, in which they would be dolts or something.  So I'm not trying to assert that they Did It Right™.

Rather... I'm just saying that there are plausible scenarios in which they did, and so until and unless there's evidence to the contrary, perhaps not go jumping to too many conclusions?

 

[klgraham1013]

5 hours ago, Moss said:

Thanks @Snark for your reply and fantastic mod. Making History was released on March 13th and as far as I can tell you put your mod together a day later. I find it bizarre that Squad couldn't put in the same effort. It makes me suspect that they don't possess the IP for Porkjet's work and they'd need to negotiate with him some kind of arrangement, since they'd be adding it to their game which they charge money for. 

Porkjet was hired by Squad to do art assets for the game.  How on earth Squad wouldn't own those assets is beyond me.  There has to be more to it.

[MR L A]

2 minutes ago, Snark said:

[whole post]

Yeah, I'm aware of most of what you said :( I'm not somebody that is ignorant of the legalities of game development... but I just think its a very long, complicated sin that for whatever reason Porkjet's parts weren't made stock (I'd probably be happy with somebody else having a pass at them, as long as its consistent).

It does seem strange that, presuming it is a legal thing, that they can release the paid-for work for free, but not include it in the game. Unless that somehow infringes on PJ's art being used to turn a profit... It is tremendously annoying that it's the customer that ends up suffering though. 

Anyway, what was this thread about again? Oh yes! Nicer parts please! huh, I remember this kind of thread used to generate complaints about what art style to use or some people saying the inconsistency was "very kerbal" - thankfully, this no longer matters. They could implement the version thingy and have the current style as an option (or default).

[Superfluous J]

8 minutes ago, klgraham1013 said:

Porkjet was hired by Squad to do art assets for the game.  How on earth Squad wouldn't own those assets is beyond me.  There has to be more to it.

I'm pretty sure that's part of the speculation that Snark (and I) won't do because it is of 0 utility.

[klgraham1013]

3 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:

I'm pretty sure that's part of the speculation that Snark (and I) won't do because it is of 0 utility.

That was more a rhetorical post.  I don't expect to ever know an answer.

[MR L A]

Just now, klgraham1013 said:

That was more a rhetorical post.  I don't expect to ever know an answer.

Do NDA's ever expire? Would be interesting to know what happened even like a decade down the line.

[klgraham1013]

1 minute ago, MR L A said:

Do NDA's ever expire? Would be interesting to know what happened even like a decade down the line.

All known facts about NDAs are under NDA.  

[Moss]

Seems like a reasonable explanation to me, and is similar to my own theories on the matter. However, much as I'm grateful to the modding community and their dedication to addressing stock limitations, I'm still not satisfied with having to resort to mods. Not because they're poor quality, far from it; I just don't like having to rely on someone who could stop updating the mods at any time for no reason without warning. To the point where I've considered learning Unity and Blender for this exact contingency, so at least I can always be sure of being able to address these things myself.

[Snark]

2 hours ago, Moss said:

I just don't like having to rely on someone who could stop updating the mods at any time for no reason without warning.

An excellent and valid concern, and anyone who uses mods should do so with their eyes open. 

Although one factor that's worth paying attention to-- which I suspect most mod users don't-- is, what's the license on the mod.  Specifically, is it a license that would allow someone else to pick up the mod if the original author goes AWOL.

Some mods' licenses are much more permissive than others.

• If you're using a mod with a restrictive license that doesn't allow others to distribute modified copies-- e.g. "All Rights Reserved", or CC-BY-NC-ND -- then you're skating on somewhat thinner ice, because you're completely at the mercy of the individual modder, and if they ever walk away from the mod, then the mod is irretrievably dead as soon as (and if) KSP ever updates in a way that breaks the mod.
• On the other hand, if you're using a mod whose license does allow derived works-- e.g. MIT, or CC-BY-NC-SA, or GNU GPLv3, to name a few-- then you're on firmer ground.  That's because if the author goes poof, someone else may pick up the mod and breathe new life into it.  Happens all the time.  No guarantees, of course ... but there are a lot of eager modders out there and lots of mods have come back to life in circumstances like this one.

So yes, you've got a valid point, but it's not completely outside your control-- you can, at least, pick and choose which mods you use, and can make a point of picking the ones with more "survivable" licenses if that's a scenario that concerns you.